Are You Addicted to Your Ex?

Months after Katie’s boyfriend broke up with her she still couldn’t get him out of her mind. “He’s the first thing I think about when I wake up every morning. I remember we’re not together and I cry. Then I look at his Instagram page and see him going on with his life and it feels so unfair! My friends tell me I should move on but how can I? He’s always in my head. I want to be okay again, I do. But without him, I’m just not.”

Four months after her breakup, Katie was showing no signs of recovering from her severe heartbreak. Sadly, this is by no means an unusual situation. Many of us struggle to get over our ex when we’re heartbroken. We spend months feeling completely obsessed with the person who broke our heart, unable to let go of the relationship we lost. We crave the person so badly we go through all our texts and images of them just to get a brief taste—of what it was like when we last felt whole—when we last felt okay. Without the person who broke our heart by our side nothing else seems to matter. No one else seems worthwhile.

It’s as if we’re addicted to our ex.

Because we are.

Brains studies have found that the withdrawal of romantic love actives the same mechanisms in our brain as get activated when opioid addicts are withdrawing from heroin. In other words, love is addictive and the withdrawal of love hits us like it would if we were suddenly deprived of any ‘substance’ upon which we had become dependent. We go through withdrawal.

Katie’s brain, was responding like the brain of an addict. It was trying to get her to find a fix. And since Katie couldn’t have her ex back (the heroin), the best she could do was indulge herself in memories of him—the images and videos and texts (the methadone). And while such reminders can soothe for a short time but they will also make the next wave of cravings even stronger.

Getting over heartbreak has many similarities to quitting other types of addictions like drugs, cigarettes, alcohol, or gambling. You need to take seriously the pressure your mind will create to get you to seek contact with the drug/person/activity because you will have to resist this pressure and find ways to manage the intense cravings you will feel.

1. Go cold turkey. To get over your ex you have to eliminate all contact points with them, at least temporarily (or to the extent you can if circumstances do not allow a full disconnect). That means, delete them from your phone, block them on social media, and copy pictures and video to where they are least accessible.

2. Use mindfulness to ride out the cravings. Cravings come in waves. If you feel overcome by the need to reach out to your ex, focus on your breathing, meditate, and ride out the wave of need until it subsides. The peak intensity of such waves typically passes within a few minutes.

3. Distract your mind. Keep yourself busy. The goal is to fill your mind with whatever you can so there are fewer openings for your ex to pop into your thoughts. Since we cannot tell ourselves to NOT think about something (we can but it doesn’t work) we need to think of something else instead, and keeping busy and engaged with whatever you can is the best way to do that.

4. Slips make the cravings stronger. Recognize that you need to be as disciplined as possible because slipping up and for example, going through your happy vacation pictures with your ex will set you back and increase the intensity of your cravings.

5. Reframe what your ex means to you. When you were together your ex was a source of happiness and security and stability. That was then. Now that they’ve broken your heart they are something else—heroin. Stay away from the heroin. It no longer provides happiness and security–it provides emotional pain.

The key to recovering from heartbreak is to recognize that you are addicted to your ex and that you need to break your addiction. Doing so requires the same determination and fight it takes to get over any addiction. Be strong, be determined, persevere, and you will win.

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